Coding · Head-to-head
Windsurf vs Grok Build
Windsurf (freemium, AI Score 7.2/10) vs Grok Build (paid, AI Score 8.1/10). Side-by-side pricing, features, pros and cons, and which to pick.
The verdict
Pick Windsurf if…
- →you need a genuinely free option
- →budget is the constraint
- →your primary use case is developers already productive in windsurf's cascade workflow who have no urgent reason to migrate, and teams evaluating cognition's stack who want an editor-side agent sitting alongside devin's cloud agents.
Pick Grok Build if…
- →overall capability matters more than price (AI Score 8.1 vs 7.2)
- →your primary use case is terminal-first developers already paying for supergrok or x premium+ who want an agentic cli with plan review and live web context rather than another ide to learn.
Side-by-side specs
| Spec | Windsurf | Grok Build |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Coding | Coding |
| Pricing model | freemium | paid |
| Headline pricing | Free tier; paid plans from $20/mo (the Devin lineup now served at windsurf.com) — verify before buying | Included with SuperGrok ($30/mo) or X Premium+ ($40/mo) |
| Free tier | Yes, but it is credit-metered and is Devin's free tier, not the unlimited-basic-completions-forever tier this entry once described. That tier no longer exists. Confirm current allowances on the live pricing page before relying on it. | — |
| AI Score | 7.2/10 | 8.1/10 |
| Best for | Developers already productive in Windsurf's Cascade workflow who have no urgent reason to migrate, and teams evaluating Cognition's stack who want an editor-side agent sitting alongside Devin's cloud agents. | Terminal-first developers already paying for SuperGrok or X Premium+ who want an agentic CLI with plan review and live web context rather than another IDE to learn. |
| Editor's pick | — | — |
| Use cases | development agents | development agents |
| Date added | 2025-06-01 | 2026-05-26 |
Pros and cons
Windsurf
Coding · freemium
Pros
- ✓Cascade remains one of the better-designed agent loops: it plans, edits across files, runs commands, reads output and iterates without needing constant re-prompting
- ✓Repo-wide indexing means the agent locates the relevant files itself instead of making you paste context
- ✓Mixes cheap in-house SWE-series models for routine edits with frontier models for hard problems, so agent runs are not uniformly expensive
- ✓Enterprise self-hosted and air-gapped deployment with zero data retention, which Cursor does not offer at any tier
- ✓Full VS Code fork with terminal execution and file-write access, not a chat sidebar bolted onto an editor
Cons
- ×The founding team including CEO Varun Mohan left for Google DeepMind in July 2025 and Cognition bought what remained, so an independent product roadmap is not a safe assumption
- ×windsurf.com resolved to Cognition's Devin site when checked on 2026-08-10, meaning the plans a buyer actually encounters are Devin's and no Windsurf-branded price could be confirmed on any live page
- ×Cursor and Claude Code have caught up on multi-file agentic work, erasing the 2025 lead this entry's original 9.1 score was built on
- ×Pricing is credit-metered and hard to forecast for a team; the unlimited free tier that once made the product an easy recommendation is gone
🔧
Grok Build
Coding · paid
Pros
- ✓Out of beta at v1.0 (August 7, 2026) with MCP tools, sandboxed runs, codebase restore and session forking all landing in one release
- ✓Plan Mode plus v1.0's full-script permission prompts give an unusually explicit consent flow for an agent holding shell access
- ✓Runs Grok 4.5, the Opus-class model xAI also shipped into Cursor and Perplexity, not a cut-down CLI tier
- ✓Real-time web and X search inside the agent loop, which competitors approximate with external MCP servers
- ✓Flat subscription pricing means a heavy refactoring session costs no more than a one-line fix
Cons
- ×No free tier at all; the cheapest way to run it is a $30/mo SuperGrok subscription
- ×Thin independent track record: three months old, and xAI publishes no CLI-specific coding benchmarks
- ×Access tiers already moved once (Heavy-only to SuperGrok + Premium+ in eleven days), so today's gate is not a promise
- ×Naming collision with 'Build Mode' inside consumer Grok makes docs and community answers hard to search
Related comparisons
Updated 2026-08-10. Spec data sourced from official product pages and tracked in our public directory at /tools.